Computational Synthesis: From Basic Building Blocks to High Level Functionality

Papers from the AAAI Spring Symposium

Computational synthesis research seeks formal algorithmic procedures that combine low-level building blocks or features to achieve given arbitrary high-level functionality. The main challenge is scaling to high complexities, and the paths of investigation deal with automatic composition of building blocks into useful modules, automatic abstraction of module functionality, and automatic hierarchical reuse of modules. The symposium focused on domain-independent methods that address modularity, regularity, hierarchy and abstraction in automatic synthesis. Recently there has been a surge of interest in these fundamental issues from three directions: AI researchers interested in scaling discovery processes, engineers interested in fully automated design, and biologists interested in the origin of complexity.